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Nov. 27, 2018 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
49:05
Episode 318 Scott Adams: The Steep Drop in Racism, Climate Change Reporting and Human Shields
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Oh.
So you saw the title, maybe.
Perhaps. You saw the title of my Periscope, in which I talked about the steep drop in racism in this country.
Have you seen the story?
No, you haven't seen the story.
I just made that up.
And normally I would feel bad about just making up stuff, especially about something so important.
Racism, that's an important topic.
You shouldn't just be making up stuff about racism.
Oh, unless you're the news, because apparently you can just make up stuff.
So do you remember how yesterday, and I think the day before, I was talking about how the charge of racism is Had just disappeared from CNN. Suddenly, it went from the biggest issue to just disappeared.
And I don't know how many CNN producers follow me on Periscope, but man, it was a little overcompensating today.
Today, the entire first block, you know, the top headlines on the top left, it was all racism.
It was every angle you could have on racism.
And of course, most of it is Let's say not legitimate.
For example, one of their articles again repeats the hoax that they're actually reporting as fact that the president said the white supremacists at Charlottesville were fine people.
Now, of course, that didn't happen.
He said that the people on both sides of the statue questioned Which is a lot more than the few people who were marching.
He said that there were good people on both sides of the question about the statue.
But again, again, CNN allowed an opinion person to report it as fact without any question to it.
Now normally you would be kicked off a website if you repeated something that's not a fact as a fact.
That should be enough to get you no longer able to write opinion pieces for CNN, but apparently that's almost a requirement these days.
But here's the funny part.
The top two articles on CNN about racism, of course it has to be about Trump, right?
So here's the first headline.
It says, Obama's victory lifted millions of Americans, but for white supremacists, he lit a powder keg that was exacerbated by Trump's victory.
So the first story is that the election of President Obama, a black American, made racism go up.
Here's the second story.
Trump says he's not a racist.
Well, that's good. But the second part of the title is, that's not how white nationalists see it.
And you read the story, and the second story is that racism went up because President Trump was elected.
Now, The first story, just to summarize, the first story is that racism went up because President Obama was elected.
The second story is that racism went up because President Trump was elected.
Therefore, if those two claims are true, and we're going to talk about how true those claims are, but if those two things are true, what has the trend taught us?
I think it taught us that CNN is going to report that racism is up, no matter what happens.
If Elizabeth Warren became our next president, would CNN report racism is down?
Probably not.
Probably not. And how do we know racism is up or down?
Have you ever wondered that? How do you measure Whether racism is up or down.
Now we've already determined that the racist groups, the few people that will go on camera and say racist stuff and they're okay being quoted and they're picture taken.
So that group of geniuses will tell you that they have been inspired if a black man becomes president or a white man becomes president.
I'm pretty sure they're going to say they got inspired no matter what.
Aren't they in the job of recruiting?
So CNN talks to the people who are literally in charge of recruiting other racists, and they say, hey, is the news causing you to be better or worse at recruiting?
Is the racist going to say, you know, it's really bad for racism these days.
People are being flexible and open-minded all over the place.
It's really bad for business.
Racism is way down.
Recruiting is really being impacted by all the good stuff that's happening.
Said no racist ever.
If your job is to recruit, what do you say no matter what when somebody puts a microphone in front of you?
You don't say, yeah, things aren't going my way.
Everybody's being kind to each other.
I didn't see this happening. It's a really bad day for racism.
They do not say that.
Now, if you're a professional racist whose job it is to recruit other racists to your little racist society or whatever, no matter what is happening in the world, if they put a microphone in front of your face, what are you going to say?
Yeah, we're really inspired now.
We're inspired by Obama.
We're inspired by Trump.
We're inspired by anything that happens, basically.
Whoever's president. Who's president?
Bernie? Bernie Sanders is president?
Wow! I'm inspired.
So, the first thing you have to understand is if you put a microphone in front of a racist recruiter, he's going to say business is good.
That's all he's going to say.
Doesn't matter what.
Now, how do you measure, how do you fact check The racist.
Well, as luck would have it, there is an organization whose primary reason for existing, financially, financially being a key word, they make their money By reporting on racist organizations and racist events.
So if there's a racist event, they report it so that they can capture them all and we know what's happening with racist events, which is very important.
It's called the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Now, if your job...
Let me just walk you through the logic here.
Let's say it's your job And it's sort of a new industry, right?
We haven't been reporting on racism in a coherent way for hundreds of years.
Rather, it's sort of new that we have this organization, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and that their job is to track racism.
Now, if it's your job, and you get money for it, and the money makes you happy, and the money allows you to have a good life, And you like money, do you think money has anything to do with your decisions?
I'm gonna say yes.
So, for example, do you think the Southern Poverty Law Center is likely to report that racism is trending down sharply?
Because if they did, the people paying them might be tempted to say, looks like this problem is solving itself.
We don't really need reporting, it's just down every year.
You cannot expect the group that controls the data uses probably some degree of subjectivity, but it does look like the groups they're reporting are legitimately racist groups.
I think that part is probably accurate.
But have you noticed what they track?
If you were going to measure, let's say you had access to any kind of data, so you could get any kind of data on anything, you were magic.
What would be the way you would measure racism in this country?
Now, there might be a number of different ways you'd look at it.
You'd look at violence, for sure.
You would look at the number of organizations that are explicitly racist organizations, for sure.
And the Southern Poverty Law Center looks at both of those things.
That's really good, right? So you should be tracking the number of organizations, and they are, and you should be tracking the number of events, you know, the violent events that are hate-based.
You should track those things.
But what's missing?
Isn't the thing that's missing the number of racists?
Wouldn't that be the most illuminating number?
Just how many racists?
Because there could easily be more organizations, but fewer racists.
I don't know if that's likely.
I don't know if that's true. I'm not going to make that claim.
But don't you want to know the number of people?
As a percentage of the country or even as a raw number, both would be good.
So, I notice that the Southern Poverty Law Center does not count number of people who identify as racist, and it could be there's no way to track that.
Maybe people just don't admit it.
So instead, as a proxy, they track the number of events and the number of organizations.
Now, if you are paid to track the number of racist organizations, do you think that next year you will find more of them, or next year you will find fewer of them, or next year you will find that basically it's the same number as last year?
Which of those gets you paid next year?
More of them. If they started reporting, well, it looks good.
We're trending in the right direction.
There's fewer hate groups every year.
Woo woo! And by the way, we said there were a thousand of them last year, however many, I think there were about a thousand actually.
We said there were a thousand last year, and it looks like at least a hundred of them were just a website by a guy in a basement.
So we're taking that off the list.
So really it's down 100 this year.
They're not gonna say that.
They're not in the business to tell you there's less racism.
So the one and only keepers of how much racism there is are strongly incented to say there's more.
And it does make me wonder what it takes to be a racist organization.
How many people have to be in the group Before you're a racist organization?
That's a serious question.
If there's a website that says, hey, we're a racist group, we're meeting on Tuesday, I'm pretty sure you get on the list, right?
The Southern Poverty Law Center is probably not going to drive to your town in, you know, Harry Butt, Montana, They're not going to drive into your little town in Harry Butt, Montana, which I'm sure is the name of a town, and ring up the racists and say, hey, we're doing some research on all the racists.
You've got a website. It says you meet on Tuesday.
Can I confirm that you're a real organization and not a guy in the basement with a website?
I don't think they do that.
Do they? Yes, I meant Harry Butte, not Bud, of course.
So Harry Butte, Montana, home of a guy with a website, gets counted.
Now, let's say there's some ambiguity.
Let's say you're in charge of counting the number of racist organizations, and some of them are sort of on the margin.
You look at it and you're like, eh, I can see why somebody would say it is, but I can see that they don't really say they're white supremacists, so is it fair to call them that when they don't say that of themselves?
Which way is the Southern Poverty Law Center going to lean?
Which way gets you paid?
You're going to always lean in the direction that gets you paid, unless there's something mentally wrong with you.
So, I have made the statement that racism is in steep decline.
I don't believe there's any evidence against that statement.
Now, I'm not saying that like I really know it's true or that I should convince you it's true, but here's my instinct.
So this is my instinct just living and breathing in the real world and interacting with real people and just being alive for as many years as I have.
And I want to test this against your own instinct.
If there was no such thing as the news, Would you notice that racism is on the rise?
Because there's nothing happening in my town, my life, my family, my experience, there's nothing happening that I could identify as a rise in racism.
Nothing. Absolutely nothing.
There's no gray area.
Now, of course, I hear about racist events, but I only hear about them on the news.
That's partly because of where I live, you know, it's a low crime area and things work pretty well here.
But, you know, and I'm sure if you live somewhere else, maybe you'd hear about it all the time.
But my feeling is, so here's my, here's my, what will I call this?
I'm going to call it true until somebody can prove to me it isn't.
So this is my belief.
I'll just call it the belief.
Subject to correction.
And if somebody can fact check this, I would like to know.
It'd be good to know. My belief is that racism has steadily declined every year of my life.
Would anybody disagree with that?
And that it has also declined this year.
Because keep in mind, most people don't follow the news.
It's actually a rarity to follow the news.
And people don't necessarily believe the news.
So the news is, you know, saying if it leads, it bleeds.
So if there's any kind of violence and they can put any kind of a racial element on that, it makes it a better story.
So the news is all racism, racism, racism.
And I'm not, for not one minute am I diminishing The importance of the story.
It probably does help.
It probably does help that they report it because it keeps us in check.
Maybe it acts as a way to keep it down or something.
So I think the racism stories are important and they talk about an important thing, but it feels like there is less racism on the ground than at any time in American history.
Maybe any time in human history.
That's what it feels like.
Now, maybe because I'm not black, I don't have the sensitivity to it, I'm just not seeing it, but I would love to know the experience of, let's say, an adult black family.
Now, let's say somebody who's older.
Let's say somebody who's a 40-year-old black man or woman who doesn't follow the news.
That's important. They don't follow the news.
They're not being influenced by the news.
What would they say?
Would they say, yeah, racism is worse this year than it's ever been?
They might. And if they did say that, I would be very alarmed.
But if they don't follow the news, I think that on the ground, it's just less every year.
And here's how I would define less.
You're a white business owner.
And a black job applicant comes in.
Are you likely to discriminate compared to, let's say, last year?
To me it seems like the ability to get a job, the ability to marry anybody you want to marry, the ability to free associate, the ability to be friends, the cross-pollinization, to me it seems like it's better than ever.
I remember my late stepson who passed away this year, but I remember when he was young, maybe eight or so, and I would go into his bedroom and he had one poster on his wall.
So it was his hero.
So it was only one poster that he thought was important enough to put on his wall.
And of course it was Michael Jordan.
So the only person that he wanted to idolize in the sports world was a black adult male.
And then you look at his, I guess it was an iPod at the time, and you say, show me what music you're listening to.
And it would be all black artists.
So all of his musical preferences, his sporting preferences, and then the way he dressed.
So he only wanted to dress in a way that was sort of, you know, inspired by that culture.
And, you know, so he was the whitest little kid, but in his world, he was born into a world where being black was the best thing ever.
Now, I don't know that he would say it that way, so I don't want to, you know, I wouldn't put words in his mouth, but his His impression of the world is that being a famous black person, that's his role model.
Now, was that true when you were a kid?
Most of you are adults.
Probably not, right? You also had your heroes.
Some of them were black, some of them were white.
But in his era, the kids that are born today, it's completely different.
The whole black-white thing doesn't mean anything like it used to mean when I was a kid.
So it seems to me That racism is just shrinking every year.
And a lot of it just has to do with how much interaction you have.
The more you interact, the less race matters.
Because in a daily interaction, it just doesn't come up.
And then you become friends, you become co-workers, you become lovers, you become whatever you're becoming.
But I'm going to put that stake in the ground.
Boop. That if you did not watch the news, your daily life would suggest that racism is the lowest it has ever been.
Now it might also be true that we're more willing to talk about it and complain about it than we ever have been.
So it could be that people are just Feel more comfortable talking about it as a topic because it's in the news, because there's a President Trump, because the last president was a President Obama.
Those two things just give us, you know, they trigger us to talk about the topic.
But my guess is things are better.
All right. I've noticed that CNN has taken a new approach to the news Which I would call using children as human shields.
You know, in war areas like Syria and Iraq, you would hear that the bad people were taking the women and the children and using them as human shields so that you wouldn't bomb them because, you know, if you did, you'd kill the children as well.
And I noticed that about CNN. So CNN wants to be, you know, the anti-Trump network, and they are.
And So their approach to immigration is not to talk about assimilation and rates and crime and rule of law and what laws we should pass.
They're sort of staying away from that because they would not have a strong position there.
Because most people want a good set of rules, and actually the country, I think, is not that far off on immigration.
It's more like the government is that far off.
So how do they cover it?
They say Trump is putting kids in cages.
In other words, they're creating a story that you can't argue against without sounding like you're in favor of putting children in cages.
You can't argue against the story.
It's like using children as human shields.
Now, you know, if you were being objective, and nobody is objective, but if it were possible, you'd say, well, Obama put kids in cages too, you know, there were just less of it, and the reason there was less of it is that it was a trend that had started under Obama and simply continued because nobody was stopping it.
So the president tried to stop it, which temporarily created more children in cages, which gave CNN the story.
Now they're doing the same thing with the caravan.
Have you noticed the caravan coverage?
I talked about this yesterday.
There's that one photo of the woman with two little children and there's a tear gas or pepper spray or something going off like 50 feet away from them.
Now, if you were to talk about that objectively, You'd say stuff like, well, it looks like the caravan was using these poor people and pushing them in front to make it a news story, and CNN fell for it, or Reuters fell for it, whoever took the picture, but everybody reported it.
And you'd talk about it objectively.
But they're using these pictures of the children, and it's not tear gas, I think they said it was pepper gas or something.
So they're saying that if you were to argue against whatever position they're putting forward, that you would be in favor of pepper spraying children.
So CNN is literally taking children as human shields for their news stories so you can't criticize them.
It's like, well, you could criticize our position on immigration laws because that would just be talking about laws.
That's fine. But can you criticize us when we say it's wrong to pepper spray a child?
That's our position. Our position is that it's wrong to pepper spray as child.
Whatever you say, I'm going to turn into you in favor of pepper spraying children.
Our position is it's wrong to put children in cages.
Whatever you say, I'm going to say that makes you in favor of children in cages.
So children as human shields.
Let's talk about the climate report And the financials.
Have you heard anybody else besides me say that the climate report from just a financial perspective is actually good news because a 10% hit to the GDP over 80 years when the GDP is going to go up by multiples.
In other words, the GDP will be up this much But the climate report said, don't get so happy about it being up this much in 80 years, because it's really only going to be up this much.
There's going to be a 10% hit over that time.
Has anybody but me, have you heard anybody say that they have literally reported good news?
That it's not that big a problem.
Yes, we have to do all the things we can do to make sure it doesn't get worse, and you would do those things anyway for green energy to make the world a better place.
Oh, somebody said the Wall Street Journal did.
I haven't seen that link.
Somebody can send me that link.
But are you...
Are you surprised that, number one, no one has debunked what I said?
In other words, no matter what I say, even on these periscopes, you know, most of you are sort of friendly to my message, as it were.
So I would expect, you know, it would be normal for 95% of you to agree with most of the things I say, which is the reason you're here in the first place, because it's a type of message that's compatible with you.
But no matter what I say, And you've noticed to hear, aren't there always at least 5% of the people who say, my God, Scott, you can't do math, you don't know the data, here's a link, you idiot, you moron.
Have you noticed that that's a very consistent thing?
But on this one topic, where I said, I'm looking at the same number as you are, and 10% is a small number, prove me wrong.
Have you seen even one person...
On this periscope or anywhere else in the world, go directly at that point and say, no, 10% over 80 years is actually a big number and it's a catastrophe.
Has anybody supported their own side in the same zip code as my point?
Somebody said I just made an argument.
I didn't see it. Ah, Wall Street Journal says it won't crash the economy.
Well, so the Wall Street Journal makes the same point, somebody's saying.
Now, have you seen that point on either...
I haven't seen it on Fox, and I haven't seen it on CNN. I'm certainly not going to see it on MSNBC. Would...
Would you say that that version of analysis is just being ignored?
Or smothered?
Or people don't know if it sounds right or not?
It was an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal.
Alright, so here's the thing.
Why is it an opinion piece?
So if the closest that message got to being a mainstream message is an opinion piece, it never made it to the news.
Didn't the original report itself make it to the news?
You know, not just the opinion.
The climate report that just came out was reported as news.
It wasn't reported as an opinion because it is news.
It's actual news. It should be reported as news.
But my point that 10% is a small number compared to how big the GDP will be by then, that's also just true, right?
It's not an opinion, is it?
And I guess that's what I'm saying, is that I don't believe I'm saying something that's an opinion.
It feels to me that it's just mathematically obvious, as in two plus two is four.
It's not my opinion.
It's just the way math works.
Both were opinion, you say.
Okay.
So look for how widely my opinion is completely unchallenged and still not reported.
It's kind of interesting, isn't it?
And I don't really have a...
I guess the best theory for why that would be Now, let me put this in a little bit of context.
You probably know by now that all of the major news outlets follow my periscopes.
And if I say something provocative that they can mock, It becomes a headline story.
I think most of you have seen that, right?
You've seen me say stuff on Periscope, and then a day later, there'll be a feature article somewhere in which they'll say, Dilbert cartoonist says dumb stuff.
Here's why we think he's an idiot.
Or Dilbert cartoonist says something useful, so we're gonna talk about it.
You've seen how often the rest of the media copies what I say here or reports it or mocks it, right?
It's a normal thing. I have high visibility and I get picked up by a lot of outlets.
Now, why are they so silent on this one point?
Both pro and anti.
Now my guess is that the people who think I might be right, that 10% is telling us there's not much of a big problem, I think those people are not confident That they can get away with that opinion.
In other words, if they report it, they're not economists, and they're probably thinking to themselves, he does sound right.
10% doesn't sound like a big deal if you're looking at 80 years.
And by the way, the 10% only happens if we don't do anything about it.
So the base assumption that even gets you to the worst case scenario of 10% is almost certainly unlikely to happen.
So it's not even 10%.
It's probably closer to zero, my guess.
If I had to guess, I would say the impact based on the report, based on their own report.
I'm not making up my own report.
I'm saying that the report that the government said that was reported as a catastrophe, By their own report, it says that's only if you don't do anything to help it.
In 80 years?
In 80 years, we're going to do plenty of stuff.
We'll be able to suck the CO2 out of the air if we care.
We'll be able to seed the clouds.
We'll be able to geoengineer the whole planet in 80 years.
Did you factor in economic growth from climate change?
My guess is that the 10% did not do anything complicated in terms of figuring out anything from the change in the value of money.
I'll bet they didn't include stuff like inflation and anything else that would make it at least a complicated analysis.
Alright, so I saw a headline that said that fentanyl China might be humiliated and embarrassed by the upcoming G20 meeting this week, maybe tomorrow or so, in which President Xi is reportedly unlikely to reach agreement with President Trump on tariffs.
To which I say, good, good.
I don't think we should make any deal with China.
One of the reasons that China is acting slow, or at least not acting effectively against the fentanyl producers, is that they have an archaic drug approval classification system.
And the story goes that because you can take fentanyl and change it a little bit until it's a different chemical but it does the same thing, That every time China classifies a new fentanyl variety as illegal, the drug dealers just change it a little bit in the lab and now it's legal again until China catches up.
So the argument is that the Chinese legal drug classification system is too slow compared to the United States where I believe, fact check me on this, I believe that our classification is more broad so that if you made a variety of fentanyl, it would still be illegal under our system or it would still be classified the same as fentanyl.
Now, does it seem to you That China can't solve that problem.
Does it seem even a little bit likely that, yeah, we understand that China is bureaucratic, things don't work the same, things take a long time, but does it even seem a little bit, even a little bit credible?
That they can't solve this problem that is as easy as saying, oh, let's do what America did and classify the whole group of drugs, even if they're a little bit different.
You think that China can't figure that out?
Do you think that President Xi can't pick up the phone And tell whoever's in charge of that, say, hey, you keep classifying these with too much detail.
You know, just say the whole range of them is illegal and then we'll be done with this.
Can you take care of that by tomorrow?
Thank you. President Xi, goodbye.
Do you think that China can't solve that problem in 24 hours?
I don't. And so, when the news...
Sorry, I've got an itchy nose.
This is weird. I hate it when my nose itches because it looks like I'm doing something else, but it's literally just the itch.
So, the headline which was interesting that I tweeted was that China would be humiliated at the G20. And I think that's the word that's the operative word.
This should be treated by President Xi as a total humiliation.
He's going to the G20 to talk about international trade and he can't even make a phone call.
Think about that. Think how ineffective and embarrassing that would be to be the head of China and you can't solve this problem that could be solved with one phone call.
In fact, you don't even have to make a phone call if you're the president of China.
You could just turn to your chief of staff, whatever they call them there, and say, hey, chief of staff, could you go tell our version of the FDA just to classify all that fentanyl stuff the same and just make it all illegal?
And then the chief of staff says, okay, I think I can have that done in an hour.
And President Xi apparently can't get that done.
Now some people are saying it's intentional, it's strategic, it's part of the negotiations.
Okay. I'm okay with you thinking that.
If you're okay with me saying that they're humiliating themselves in public and making a laughing stock of China.
China no longer deserves respect.
If you had asked me a year ago, Do you respect China?
I would say, well, they do a lot of things I don't like.
A lot of things I don't like.
But you really have to respect how well they run.
You have to respect that they're doing a good job for China.
You have to respect where they were and how far they've come to be a major power.
And a year ago, I would have said, you've got to respect China.
China. And in fact, I've said lots of glowing things about their, you know, they have engineers in charge of things, which I kind of like, because they make rational decisions.
But I'd say in the past year, they have disgraced themselves to the point where you can no longer afford them respect.
And President Xi is really the architect of that.
So, you know, he's got to take the responsibility for it.
Now, somebody asked me on Twitter yesterday.
They were concerned about me.
And they said that they hoped that China wasn't watching my periscopes.
The implication being that China might somehow act against me or kill me or something.
And I thought to myself, nobody wants to die.
Well, some people do, but most people don't want to die.
But it would actually be worth it in my case.
If China murdered me, it's not going to happen, but if China murdered me, And they did it because I'm talking about their fentanyl trade.
It wouldn't be good for the fentanyl business.
I'm a little bit too high profile for that.
So I say, you don't want to get in a fight with somebody who's willing to die.
It's the ultimate fight you don't want to get into.
If China wants to pick a fight with me, I am actually willing to die on this issue.
There aren't too many issues I'd be willing to die for.
But if I have to take a bullet to reduce the fentanyl deaths in this country, 30,000 deaths a year, if me taking a bullet could reduce the number of deaths by 10,000 a year, you know, I don't think it would, but hypothetically, if all it did was raise the profile of the issue so that people could work on it, it got more funding, got more attention, made a difference, I would take a bullet for that.
Would you not? I mean, if you were in the military and you could sacrifice yourself to save 10,000 people somewhere else, would you do it?
Well, I hope so. We have an entire military.
My understanding is that 100% of the people who are in the military would take a bullet to save 10,000 people.
So, if China takes me out, it's just not going to be good for China.
But it might save a lot of people.
All right. What would the simulation respawn you as?
I love that question because, as I've said before, There's so much of me on public digital media.
There's so much of my opinion, my personality, my physicality, what I look like, how I talk, how I move my hands.
Every part of that is part of the permanent record and will live forever on the internet.
So anybody who wants to bring me back in the future, they can do it.
All the parts are there now.
All right. Somebody says, am I real or AI? So I've said this before, but I'm doing a series in Dilbert.
You'll see in, I think in about a month, you'll see a series.
And I've said this before, that the real reason we can't create artificial intelligence is that we're trying to duplicate in a computer the intelligence that humans have.
And we keep saying, how come I can't duplicate human intelligence In my computer, why is it so hard?
It seems like we should have been done by now.
We've been talking about AI for so long and we have a little bit of it, but it feels like it would be more human-like by now.
Why can't we duplicate human intelligence?
And there's a real funny answer.
You can't duplicate something that doesn't exist.
Human intelligence is literally, not in a jokey sense, an illusion.
If you were to program a computer to act like a human, it would be a hot mess.
Because look at Twitter.
You would have to get rid of all of its logic.
You would have to get rid of the AI's willingness to look at context.
The AI would have to be emotional.
It would have to call you a racist no matter what you said.
The AI would have to be crippled From what it already is in order to be dumb enough and irrational enough to mimic human intelligence.
And so, I can't emphasize this enough.
I'm not joking.
I'm not joking. This is literally why we can't develop artificial intelligence.
We're trying to do something that logically can't be done.
You can't make a copy of something that isn't there.
And that's what we're trying to do.
We're trying to make the copy of something that never existed in the first place.
and we can't figure out why the copy doesn't look right.
What do I want for Christmas?
Well, I have to tell you that many of you know I've been taking drum lessons online.
So I have an online drum teacher.
Every couple weeks we get together on iPad and I get a drum lesson.
Now I had a digital drum set, but the digital drum set, while I have some advantages, just doesn't really sound like a drum set.
And so I bought myself for Christmas A drum set, which turns out to be really hard.
If you're not a drummer, you can't really buy a drum set.
Did you know that? Like, I thought I would just go online, I thought I would go on Amazon, and I would just look for a good drum set, you know, because I could afford to get the good one, and I would just, you know, buy a drum set.
Nobody sells that.
Did you know that? Did you know you can't buy a drum set unless you buy like a low-end kit?
If you buy the low-end, it'll sell you a set of all the stuff you need that looks like a drum kit.
As soon as you get up to the mid-range and you look to shop for a drum set, and you say, oh, here's one.
This looks exactly like what I want.
And then you click the details and it says, does not come with a snare drum.
Like, that's the most common thing.
Does not come with a snare drum.
And like, snare drum?
80% of everything you do on the drums is a snare drum.
And then it says, does not come with the hardware that sort of holds them in place.
And I'm thinking...
It doesn't come with the stuff that holds it in place.
What do you do? Put it on the floor?
No, you have to figure out how to get a separate snare drum, how to separately buy the hardware, and then you've got to find a kit that has the right number of things for the thing you're buying, and then the cymbals.
Didn't you think that if you bought a drum kit it would come with cymbals?
Because every drum kit has cymbals.
So if you buy one, of course it comes with cymbals.
Oh no! Oh no!
You do not want to buy a drum kit and cymbals as a package because you're not going to get the good stuff.
So you have to separately shop and figure out what you want for cymbals.
Now you say to yourself, well, there can't be that many options, right?
Oh, yes, there are.
There are a lot of symbols, and it turns out that there's a really big difference, and if you don't get the good ones, you're going to regret it forever, and don't go cheap on symbols, people tell me.
So, I was lucky enough to contact somebody at Sweetwater, that's a big music store, and he happened to be a drummer, so he talked me through, oh, you need this and this, and even the simplest stuff, such as I knew I wanted three cymbals, but all the pictures showed four, and I was like, ah, why can't I buy three cymbals when all basic drum kits have three, right?
Got your hi-hat, your crash, your ride.
And he explains to me, oh, it looks like it's four cymbals, but it's really three because the hi-hat is two cymbals.
Just basic stuff that you wouldn't know how to navigate until somebody who was actually a drummer tells you.
And then it gets worse. So then he mentions something about drum covers.
And I said, drum covers, meaning the surface of the drum that you actually hit with a stick.
And he says, yeah, you'll want to replace those.
And I said, replace them?
How long will it take for the ones that I buy with the drums to wear out?
And he goes, oh no, you'll probably want to replace them on the first day.
I'm like, what?
He goes, yeah, nobody likes the drum covers that come with the drums.
You know, people replace them because it gets a better sound.
And I said, okay, well, I don't want to do that because apparently it's a big pain in the ass.
You have to take apart the drum and fit it in there and tighten it up and retune it.
If you're not a drum player, retuning is going to be a problem, right?
Because you don't have the memory.
Of what it's supposed to sound like.
So I said, well, okay, well, can you point me toward the drum set that already has a good drum head on it so I don't have to do that, at least until it wears out?
And he said, they don't make those.
And I said, are you telling me that the drum industry, which is a very advanced industry, lots of big players, are you telling me that the drum industry doesn't make a drum That you would want to play if you knew how to play drums.
And he said, true.
You actually can't buy drums that a good drum player would want to play.
You can only buy parts of things that you can cobble together to make your own personal situation.
Are you freaking kidding me?
In 2018, I can't buy a drum set?
I have to compile it myself from parts?
And that's the state of the industry.
Anyway, that's enough on that.
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